This would depend on how much you wanted to see battlefield scenes, and wanted it accurate, or if you were looking for a fictional story to go with real places and dates. I personally like both. I am more keen on factual details, dates, and locations with documentaries, so I can be a little forgiving if the movies aren't overpoweringly full of historical data. I do want realistic battles and events however. I feel "Cold Mountain" was a very good movie, even if it didn't cite real battles and places. The story centered on an individual Southern soldier and his long and difficult plight. What movies do you like?
Gettysburg (1993) and Gods and Generals (2003) are two of my favorites. It is too bad they opted not to make the third one in that series. Glory is also a good film. Though a "fun" movie rather than actual history, The Outlaw Josey Wales is a classic.
Yeah Cold Mountain was pretty good. I thought the Patriot showed some pretty realistic battleground scenes as well and the renegade warfare was refreshing to watch in a movie with this subject and era.
(hehe) I mentioned Glory in the second post. It is a good flick and the performances by Broderick, Washington, and Freeman are top notch. I forgot about Red Badge of Courage, but it is a good flick. Well, by that I mean the one starring Audie Murphy. I believe there has been multiple adaptations.
Trivia: Are you aware the original author of King Kong was the same fellow who wrote Red Badge of Courage? His name was Edgar Wallace, and he was a War Correspondent in Cuba for the 1898 war wth Spain.
Glory was biased toward the Yankee side. Nonetheless, it was an incredible movie and very moving. In fact, it's one of the best war movies of all time. In addition, the battle scenes were very realistic, sort of like what we saw on Saving Private Ryan. Of course, it's difficult to explain exactly what stuff was biased in the movie Glory, as a lot of the accounts of racism and whatnot were accurate portrayals of that time period.
The Red Badge of Courage was so butchered by the studio it is a hard watch if you know and love the book, which was short enough in the first place. Gettysburg and Gods and Generals are superbly mounted and well acted if bum-numbingly long (perhaps, in the first film if we had slightly fewer scenes of Armistead going on tearfully about how he is fighting comrades he was at West Point with and in both slightly fewer "good 'ol" scenes of Southern civilians). Glory still holds it for me. The number of times I have had to correct those moaning that Matthew Broderick looked too young by pointing out that Matthew Gould Shaw was already dead before he reached the age Broderick was when the film was made.
In the line of civil war movies, I've no good list ... watched a couple of or so, because my very little knowledge regarding the Civil War (as much as like high school standard or something like that), I liked however the movie Gone with the wind!
